my cynicism
I’ll break out one more from the archives… this one dates back to probably early-mid July, during Pol 130, while Phil 303 was fresh in my mind. I had a bit too many spare cycles, not enough games to play or anime to watch, and I wasn’t particularly careful about differentiating cynicism and pessimism. So as you read this, any time you find one misused, you can probably safely substitute the other :p.
For the record, I’m feeling quite a bit more positive lately. I think taking classes that don’t point spotlights at the nasty unpleasant sides of humanity is generally beneficial for my outlook on things … something which I’ll bear in mind when selecting classes to take in the future…
You know … I think I’m becoming progressively more cynical and pessimistic. I find myself examining the motivations for the things I see a bit more often, and I am perceiving a lot more stuff as either meaningless hand-waving for the sake of funding, or just shameless self-promotion. I see less hope for change in the bad things that I see, and I see more of the bad things in my areas of interest.
Take 5 examples (because I say so!): computers, psychology, philosophy, politics, and relationships.
I used to have good hopes for what future incarnations of Windows would bring. I even entertained thoughts that maybe Microsoft was warming up to not being evil. And then, Microsoft installs Windows Genuine Advantage components on my system, as part of automatically-downloaded updates, even on volume-licensed copies of windows. Yeah, that’s right. My whole lab is now running the basic WGA components, and they got there without me interacting with the systems at all. Fortunately, vanilla dell boxes seem to get along with it just fine, but this new “feature” annoys the daylights out of me, and reminds me that Microsoft is, in fact, a corporate entity, and that as a corporate entity, the only ethical thing to do is discard common courtesy and basic regard for best practices for the sake of the bottom line, because as a corporation “ethical” means “strives to achieve the best possible profitability in order to protect the interests of the investors”.
And MS isn’t alone in this — since Google’s IPO, they’ve changed their stance from “don’t be evil” to “ehh, evil’s fine, as long as it’s profitable and doesn’t get people killed”. I recently got into a discussion with my roommate (that he very much didn’t want to have), because he felt compelled to respond when I insinuated that the moral codes which people hold to and the set of ethics by which Walmart governs itself are only concurrent when both of them involve maximum profit flowing into Walmart — which is to say, Walmart, like any publicly traded company, is not “moral” or “ethical” in the sense that people are. Something about the way I said it triggered his “but walmart has a corporate culture that …” response… I dunno.
See what I’m saying? Sweeping, nearly universal cynicism.
Back on computers, I’ve found that I passionately dislike the numerous flaws in every operating system that exists today, and have little hope that any of those flaws will be significantly improved upon in the near future (say … next 5 years). Linux sucks for ui usability, gui stability, dependence on the shell, ui consistency, and the best candidates for most apps in it are feature-poor, or are simply dirty hacks. Windows xp is mostly good, but MS seems to be pushing to make the next version of windows worse in almost every conceivable way while not actually addressing the numerous problems that XP could be better on. OS-X just … lacks good apps too, because the best apps (in many cases, the only apps) for a vast majority of tasks are either ports from linux, or ports from linux that run on X11. And the stuff that isn’t in that category is prefixed with “i” and will cost you $100-$200 or more to buy.
Now, none of that is saying that there’s not good in all of them. Windows is reasonably fast and very usable, and home to some excellent apps. Linux can be lightweight and powerful, and has some decent apps, even if they lack the features you’d expect. OS-X has a lot of great ui features. However, what I’m noticing about myself is that I’m gravitating towards the shortcomings, the sense of limitation, the sense of clumsiness and slowness that I get from trying to use them in ways that seem reasonable to me.
Even more, you could say something like “well, in a lot of those cases, you have the source, you could fix those problems” (since most of the apps I use on any platform tend to be open source anyway). But when you see the code output of one rusty, mediocre programmer … if you gave me a year and paid me a full-time salary to do it, I could maybe knock down some small number of the smaller annoyances on one platform. Software development isn’t a place for cowboys to ride in and shoot up the villains and ride back out, it’s a place for teams of engineers to converge on a set of problems and generate a solution. Because of that, I’m finding myself falling into a pessimistic mindset about the fixability of a lot of the problems I see. Rhythmbox won’t get any better at what it sucks at, because it’s wrapped up in gnome politics. xchat won’t get a frame model, because that’s not what xchat does. Nautilus will eventually get an svn plugin like tortoise, thanks to the NaughtySvn project, but … who knows when? I mean, who has that as a priority?
Psychology is another good example of the pervasive cynicism I’m feeling these days. The impression a lot of psych classes have given me in the past is a sense of “this is how things are” or “we know how this mechanism works” or “this is scientifically testable, at least”. Social psych changed all that. Looking at these various studies, I found the social psych research community to be fundamentally divided across every topic I looked at that was less than 100 years old. There’s half a dozen incompatible theories to explain one behavior pattern, and each of them stands up to the experimental verification of the effects that they predict, to varying degrees. They all differ by small nuances, and overlap in the fundamental (basic, objective) conditions, and where they overlap in other areas, they get “interaction effects” that aren’t isolated by research and aren’t consistently reproduced by other researchers … so you end up with a core set of truths and mechanisms, surrounded by a giant floating cloud of bullshit.
See, cynicism!
And philosophy? Taking a modern philosophy class (phil 303, intro to modern) taught me a valuable lesson: if you let half a dozen philosophers to independently explain the nature of something (anything, doesn’t matter what), and someone else has written about it before, those philosophers can each find some point at which they can say “I disagree with X’s assumption of Y, this isn’t self evident”. But rather than submitting their own work to the same degree of scrutiny, they’ll simply assert “however, this IS self-evident” and rattle off their own baseless and completely untestable assumptions, and build complex theories on that. And this has been going on since Aristotle got his hands on Plato. The net result is that philosophy (read: metaphysics) doesn’t explain anything and doesn’t accomplish anything meaningful, except to the extent that it finds the need for testable conclusions, at which point it gives way to science. Except, as we saw with social psych (and other social sciences, and some “hard” sciences), the mechanisms that scientists propose are often built on very little more basis in experimentally verifiable hypothesis than philosophy.
cyn-i-cism.
Politics, politics, politics. Polisci 130 is a horrible class for someone in the throes of a multi-semester-long cynical funk, because it’s taught with a strong emphasis on political perspectives, and tends to really go after the “realist” perspective and its consequences. At least, it has in the first two weeks. That’d be fine, except that “political realism” is precisely the same as cynicism. The idea behind the whole paradigm is that human nature is inherently greedy and territorial, and that as a result global anarchy and perpetual war is the natural, inescapable conclusion to world politics. Then you start looking at things like … political strategies and maneuvers. We just got an introduction to Machiavelli, as a core influence of some foundational American ideals (like, separation of church and state — that apparently is the direct consequence of Machiavelli’s philosophy). As a side note, I find it ironic and a little skewed that the “political realist” perspective is cynicism in a nutshell.
But even without the influence of the polisci class, I find my beliefs about politics in general largely aligned with Jon Stewart’s: I’m finding a lot of what goes on in the world to be pretty absurd. But not just in politics, not just in news. Even in daily life, even in science, even in academia … everything I see just smacks of absurdity, of failures of insight, of boring tedium, of greed and corruption.
So I’ve covered cynicism in computers and IT, psychology, philosophy, politics. I’ve saved the best for last: relationships.
I dunno, lately, I feel like the whole dating world is half “thrill of the hunt” and half “stupid power games”. You see sites like intellectual whores, with its characterization of women, and the whole “ladder” system… see how true it seems. That, coupled with my compelling lack of success in the relationship realm, which makes me pretty jaded and pessimistic there too…
So there you have it. Several good examples of my newfound pervasive, virulent cynicism.
But why is it that way? Am I just noticing for cynicism the way I’ve always been? Or is it actually progressing, getting worse? Is there a way to change it? To stem the tide? To drag myself out of the pits of relentless negativity? If so, what are they?